Facebook Ads Geographic and Demographic Targeting
Geographic Targeting & Demographic Targeting with Facebook Ads
This post is part of a series titled “How To Use Facebook Ads For Small Business”. Our goal is to help an average small business owner understand how to use Facebook ads effectively.
Using geographic area, gender and other info to refine your audience
If your goal is to increase in store traffic or do more sales at your physical location, it only makes sense to limit any advertising campaign to within nearby areas. The actual distance will vary depending on your audience and the type of area you live in.
Facebook gives you several options for Geographic Targeting. The first step is to enter the town you store is located. Facebook will autofill suggestions as you type. Select your town when you see it listed.
The default setting is 25 miles around your town. For most campaigns, this will be an ideal distance that gives a little overlap for people living in other towns within driving range.
If you live in a very rural area where driving longer distances is the norm, you might consider broadening the range to 50 miles. If you live in a major city with many shopping options and larger numbers of people nearby, you might consider dropping the range down to 10 miles. To do this, select the down carrot next to your town and select your distance.
Facebook also offers the option of excluding certain areas from your campaign. For example, if you know that customers in a certain suburb are unlikely to buy the product you are advertising, you might choose to exclude them from the campaign. To do this, select the down carrot next to your town and select Exclude Locations on the bottom. Type the name of the towns you wish to exclude.
Age
If you know the ideal age range for a brand of scarves is women ages 45 and up, why not narrow a campaign down to just that age range? Most products appeal to a particular age range, but not all. For brands that customers of any age might buy, consider limiting your age range to 18 and up, to eliminate minors that can’t afford the purchase.
Gender
This may seem obvious, but unless a product is truly a purchase for men and women, limit the audience to just the gender that you’re targeting.
Connections
This section is extremely important, and what you select will depend on the goal you’ve established for the campaign. If your goal is to add new fans to your facebook page, you’ll want to select people who are not connected to your page already.
People who are already fans of your page are obviously familiar with your store and much more likely to find value in whatever message you’re promoting. They’re an ideal audience for almost any campaign related to your store. However, targeting them alone will give you a much smaller audience to choose from. If your goal is anything other than increasing page likes, you’ll most likely want to select “All” to target both fans of your page and non-fans.
Friends of Connections
Another option for targeting is to focus on friends of people connected to a page. This could be your page, or a page that you’ve targeted under interests.
Relationship
You also have the option of targeting people based on whether their single, in a relationship, engaged, or married. If you’re product or your established goal is related to bridal registries or wedding events in any way, taking advantage of these demographics can be extremely useful.
For example, in example two, our goal was to increase bridal registry purchases by 20%. Reaching women who became engaged in the last 6 months would be an ideal way to target new brides and share bridal registry options with them.
Education
Here you can narrow your audience to people who are in high school or college or are college graduates. Under College and College Grad, you can narrow your audience down to students or alumni of a specific institution, a specific field of study, or even the year someone graduated. This option is perfect for collegiate products or events.
Workplace
If your area has a large employer holding an event you might choose to target your audience using the workplace section.
More Categories
Facebook offers even more options for targeting specific audiences. Options like which mobile device they own, when their birthday is, and how old their children are give you even greater control over who you’re targeting.
Action Step 7: Select your Demographic Info
Using the information above and referring to the walkthrough in the previous chapter for additional help, select the demographic information for your audience in the ad interface. This information includes age, gender, geographic location, connections, relationship, education and workplace. You don’t need to enter information for every category, just those that you’re using to target your audience.
Stop when you get to the Interests section – we’ll cover this in the next chapter.
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